To cut and run from Iraq now would mean abandoning Iraq to chaos or tyranny, writes leading US conservative Robert Kagan
Calls for a withdrawal from Iraq are starting to pop up all over the place now and will proliferate in the coming days and weeks. I find even the administration's strongest supporters, including fervent advocates of the war a year ago and even some who could be labelled "neoconservatives", now despairing and looking for an exit.
They don't put it quite that way. Instead, they say that seeking democracy in Iraq is too ambitious; we need to lower our sights and settle for stability. But this is probably just a way station on the road to calling for withdrawal, for it ought to be clear that even establishing stability will require a continued US military occupation and casualties for some time to come.
Faced with that reality, conservatives can be heard muttering these days that if the Iraqis won't take responsibility for their own country, we should leave them to their fate. That is what "lowering our sights" really means.
John Kerry and his advisers moved to this stance a couple of weeks ago when they declared that the goal of democracy was "too heroic" and the United States should limit itself to seeking "stability". It's not inconceivable, though, that he may gradually abandon this rhetoric and begin running openly as the candidate who will get the US out of the Iraq quagmire, under the guise of handing it off to NATO or the UN. That could soon seem a better political strategy. Few Americans will believe that Kerry can really do a better job of fighting the war than President Bush.
So get ready for the coming national debate over withdrawal. The unthinkable is becoming thinkable.
All but the most blindly devoted Bush supporters can see that Bush administration officials have no clue what to do in Iraq tomorrow, much less a month from now. Consider Falluja: one week they're setting deadlines and threatening offensives; the next week they're pulling back.
Then naming one of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard generals to lead the pacification of the city is the kind of bizarre idea that only desperate people can conjure. The administration is evidently in a panic, a panic being conveyed to the American people.
Events in Falluja have also conveyed another impression: the administration is increasingly reluctant to fight the people it defines as the bad guys in Iraq. No one wants more American casualties. And no one doubts that more violence in Iraq may alienate more of the Iraqi population.
But this reluctance can also appear both to Iraqis and to the American public as a sign of declining will. Among the many lessons of Vietnam is that American support for that war remained remarkably steady until Americans began to sense that their government was no longer committed to what had been defined as victory and was looking for a way out. If Americans see signs of wavering by Bush, support for the war could decline sharply.
It is the sense that Bush officials don't know what they are doing that has fed all the new talk about "lowering our sights". No one will say, "Let's cut and run". Instead, people talk about installing a moderate but not democratic government. They talk about letting Iraq break up into three parts: Kurd, Shia, and Sunni.
But this is happy talk, designed to help avert our eyes from withdrawal's real consequences. The choice in Iraq is not between democracy and stability. It is between democratic stability, on the one hand, and civil conflict, chaos or brutal, totalitarian dictatorship and terrorism, on the other.
The next time someone suggests that the goal of democracy is too ambitious, let him explain in detail the alternative. Even if we wanted to establish a non-democratic government in Iraq, how would we do it? Is there a benevolent dictator out there who could enjoy sufficient legitimacy or wield sufficient power to maintain stability without continued US military support?
Even a reconstituted, Sunni-dominated Iraqi army - if desirable or possible - could not impose order without all of the Saddam regime's brutal tactics, including the inevitable massacre of probably thousands of rebellious Shias. Is that what advocates of "lowering our sights" have in mind?
Nor would partition be any easier. Yes, there could be an independent Kurdistan (and a war with Turkey) in the north. But the Shias and Sunnis in Iraq are neither geographically nor culturally separate. They are intermingled.
So, does partition mean transfers of population? Who would carry out those transfers, and how? Again, people who call for partition as an alternative should explain exactly what their plan would look like and how it would produce a more stable result.
The truth is, if the goal is stability, that the alternatives are no easier to carry out and no less costly in money and lives than the present attempt to create some form of democracy in Iraq.
The real alternative to the present course is not stability at all but to abandon Iraq to whatever horrible fate awaits it: chaos, civil war, brutal tyranny, terrorism or more likely a combination of all of these - with all that entails for Iraqis, the Middle East and American interests.
That is what President Bush has been saying all along. But Bush himself is the great mystery in this mounting debacle. His commitment to stay the course seems utterly genuine. Yet he continues to tolerate policymakers, military advisers and a dysfunctional policymaking apparatus that are making the achievement of his goals less and less likely.
It's not even clear that he understands how bad the situation in Iraq is or how close he is to losing public support for the war, a support that once lost may be impossible to regain.
• Robert Kagan is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.